It would sure be nice if the industry could get together to define a standard for schematic, netlist and board layout files. That would allow users to select the best (for them) tool for each step without having to worry about incompatibilities. It would allow research into just a single phase of the problem without having to do every tool from one end to the other. That would probably cut into profits if you could easily replace one tool with another. Oh well, maybe one day...
________________________________ From: calvingrier <[email protected]> To: [email protected] Sent: Tuesday, June 30, 2009 2:13:09 PM Subject: [kicad-users] Re: Export to Spectra DSN functionality --- In [email protected], Greg Dyess <gregory.dy...@...> wrote: > > While we're on the topic of external, auto-routers, has anyone seen this one: > http://www.wand.net.nz/~amb33/toporouter/ > It appears to use some "new"(??) methodology called "Rubberband based > topological routing" instead of the traditional "geometric sequential maze > routing". Something I noticed was that it created flowing traces as opposed > to traces with hard corners. It appears to have been developed to work > primarily with PCB. Has anyone used this or knows how well it actually works? > Topo-R has been around a long time. The version for Windows is nice, but you need to look at the tutorial to understand it. Topo-R Lite has limitations on nets, but they still give you access for many designs. I've tested it in single and dual layer routing, and it seems to work very well. I did find that one time a trace was overlapping, but it was easy to revise manually. It has DRC, teardrops, keepouts, pours, and many other nice features. TOPO-R CANNOT CREATE A SESSION FILE THAT CAN BE RE_IMPORTED to PCBNew. At least I've never been able to move a layout back into KiCAD/PCBNew. KiCAD throws an error when opening the .ses. The good news is Topo-R has built-in gerber and drill file output capability. You can generate what you need for the board-house after the routing is done. --CG ------------------------------------ Please read the Kicad FAQ in the group files section before posting your question. Please post your bug reports here. They will be picked up by the creator of Kicad. Please visit http://www.kicadlib..org for details of how to contribute your symbols/modules to the kicad library. For building Kicad from source and other development questions visit the kicad-devel group at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/kicad-develYahoo! Groups Links
